TO MIKE, BEST FRIEND & TRUE LOVE
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data Farrell, Mary Cronk.
Fannie never flinched : one woman’s courage in the struggle for American labor union rights / Mary Cronk Farrell.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-4197-1884-7 (hardcover)
eISBN 978-1-6131-2972-2
1. Sellins, Fannie, 1872–1919—Juvenile literature. 2. Women labor leaders—United States—Biography—Juvenile literature. 3. Labor unions—Organizing—United States—History—Juvenile literature. 4. Labor unions—United States—History—Juvenile literature. I. Title.
HD6509.S45 F37 2016
331.88092—dc23
2015040020
Text copyright © 2016 Mary Cronk Farrell
Cover and book design by Maria T. Middleton
Published in 2016 by Abrams Books for Young Readers, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
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IMAGE CREDITS
This page: Special Collections Library, Fred Waring’s America, Penn State University Libraries. This page: Special Collections Library, Fred Waring’s America, Penn State University Libraries. This page: Brown Brothers Photography. This page: Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives, Cornell University, Collection: International Ladies Garment Workers Union Photographs (1885-1985). This page: Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives, Cornell University, Collection: International Ladies Garment Workers Union Photographs (1885-1985). This page: Shelter and Clothing by Helen Kinne (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1920), 202. This page: From the Albert R. Stone Negative Collection, Rochester Museum & Science Center, Rochester, NY. This page: DN-005632 Chicago Daily News Negatives Collection, Chicago History Museum. This page: Missouri History Museum, St. Louis. This page: National Archives and Records. This page: Library of Congress. This page: The News Tribune, Tacoma, Washington. This page: The Portland Labor Press. This page: Library of Congress. This page: West Virginia & Regional History Collection, UVW Libraries. This page: Denver Public Library, Western History Collection #X-60388. This page: West Virginia & Regional History Collection, UVW Libraries. This page: Denver Public Library, Western History Collection #X60448. This page: National Archives and Records. This page: National Archives and Records. This page: Library of Congress. This page: Carnegie Mellon University Archives. This page: Robin G. Lighty Collection. This page: Courtesy of Janet Lindenmuth. This page: University of Pittsburgh. This page: Grandville Heights/Marble Cliff Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio. This page: National Archives and Records. This page: National Archives and Records. This page: National Archives and Records. This page: The New York Times. This page: Courtesy of Anthony Slomkowski. This page: University of Pittsburgh. This page: Special Collections Library, Fred Waring’s America, Penn State University Libraries. This page: Author’s collection. This page: West Virginia and Regional History Collection, UVW Libraries. This page: Denver Public Library, Western History Collection #Z-199. This page: National Archives, Records of the U.S. Information Agency (306-NT-94692). This page: Kenneth Rogers Collection, Atlanta History Center, Atlanta, GA.
CONTENTS
* * *
A STORM CENTER FOR BULLETS
FANNIE STITCHES TOGETHER A DREAM
FANNIE FINDS HER VOICE
ANGEL OF MERCY
LABOR WAR
FANNIE’S DREAM LIVES ON
AUTHOR’S NOTE
GLOSSARY
TIME LINE OF SELECT EVENTS IN THE AMERICAN LABOR STRUGGLE, 1877–1935
NOTES
SOURCES
WEBSITES FOR MORE INFORMATION
BOOKS FOR FURTHER READING
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX OF SEARCHABLE TERMS
Young eyewitnesses to the fatal shooting of Fannie Sellins, including Stanley F. Rafalko (third from right). Brackenridge, Pennsylvania, August 1919.
* * *
A STORM CENTER FOR BULLETS
NATRONA, PENNSYLVANIA, AUGUST 26, 1919
Near suppertime, gunshots echoed among the small frame houses of Natrona, Pennsylvania. People ran out to see what was happening. Seven-year-old Stanley F. Rafalko was on his way to the corner store to get his father a packet of cigarettes. When he came out, he saw sheriff’s deputies beating a man with blackjacks, and shooting over the heads of a crowd of women and children.
Dozens of witnesses say a woman named Fannie Sellins herded a group of children toward safety behind the Rafalko family’s backyard gate.
“Stop, before someone gets hurt!” Fannie shouted at the deputies.
The officers turned their weapons on her.
“Stop!” she shouted again.
The local newspaper would later report she appeared to be a “storm center” for deputies’ bullets.
* * *
FANNIE STITCHES TOGETHER A DREAM
ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI, 1897
Fannie’s head pounded from the racket of the high-speed sewing machines. Dozens of mechanized needles pumping up and down sounded a continuous clickety-clack, clickety-clack over the rumble of foot treadles and the whir of spinning spools of thread.
“Faster!” the boss shouted. “Work faster!”
Fannie longed to stretch her arms and legs and straighten her back, but she kept a firm hand on the fabric, feeding it steadily under the needle. One stray glance and the needle could tear through her finger. It happened once or twice a day to some girl in the factory.
“You bleed on the fabric, you pay for it,” the boss always said.
Fannie worked at one of two sweatshops owned and operated by the Marx & Haas Clothing Co., the largest clothing manufacturer in St. Louis. She sewed silk-lined hunting coats, each with eleven pockets. Finishing a pocket, Fannie rubbed her bleary eyes and moved on to the next.
Fannie Mooney Sellins was born in 1867, the oldest daughter of an Irish family living in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her father worked as a house-painter, and her mother worked at home caring for the family. Fannie had one older brother, a younger sister, and three younger brothers. In the 1870s, the Mooneys moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where Fannie went to school, learned to read and write, and finished the eighth grade.
She eventually married Charles Sellins and they had four children. Charles died when the youngest was still a baby. To support her family, Fannie went to work at the garment factory. Coughing from the sweatshop’s foul air, Fannie dropped the presser foot onto a new seam. Most young seamstresses working with her at the garment factory in St. Louis never had the chance to go to school. Girls as young as ten and women old enough to be grandmothers labored alongside her. They worked ten- to fourteen-hour days, six days a week. The building was hot and stifling in the summer—and bitter cold in the winter.
Women and girls at a factory similar to the one where Fannie worked pause their sewing machines for a photograph. Notice the male supervisor standing behind the workers. New York, c. 1910.
Rose Schneiderman, like Fannie, a garment worker and union organizer, works next to the large pile of fabric that makes up her day’s assignment. New York City, 1908.
“All the doors were locked from th
e outside at 7:15 each morning. Sometimes it made me sick to think what would happen in that big flimsy barracks if a fire should come,” Fannie said.
The families of most of the seamstresses had immigrated from country villages in Italy, Poland, and Russia, just as the Irish had come fifty years before, hoping for a better life in America.
Though poor and unable to read or write, they knew how to work hard, which was exactly what garment manufacturers in St. Louis wanted. Like Fannie, the new immigrants barely earned enough to live on, averaging less than five dollars a week ($145 today). If anyone complained, the boss could fire them. There were always immigrants desperate for jobs.
Fannie heard seamstresses in Chicago and New York City had banded together and demanded higher pay and safer working conditions. They had joined a union, the United Garment Workers of America, or the UGWA.
Toiling at her sewing machine, Fannie stitched together a dream. If women and girls in other cities could organize a union to improve their jobs, those in St. Louis could, too! During brief lunch breaks, she spoke with her co-workers. “If we earned a fair wage, your children wouldn’t have to work,” she said. “They could go to school.”
Uniting forces would give workers more clout to bargain with their employers. If they didn’t get fair wages and safe working conditions, they could strike. In a strike, workers walked off the job and refused to go back until the company agreed to their demands. If all the workers stuck together and didn’t give in, the factory had to shut down, and the company owners lost money. Unions gave workers the power to bargain with employers and improve their lives.
In 1902, Fannie and the other seamstresses launched Ladies’ Local 67 of the United Garment Workers of America. Marx & Haas managers feared that the new union would strike. They agreed to nearly double the workers’ wages and shorten the workday.
An immigrant family carrying their possessions as they arrive on a ship to America, c. 1900. Location unknown.
The United Garment Workers of America (UGWA) label affixed inside clothing. Some tags bore background text such as Special Order or Duck Goods. Duck was the type of fabric Fannie made into coats.
* * *
FANNIE FINDS HER VOICE
1909–1910
Fannie managed to earn enough to feed her children and send them to school, but she never made enough money to escape poverty.
Despite Marx & Haas Clothing Company’s concessions to the labor union, the workrooms were crowded and the air was filthy. Many of the employees got sick with tuberculosis, a highly contagious, incurable disease that often became fatal. If they arrived to work even a few minutes late, as punishment they were locked in the basement for an hour and not allowed to go to their sewing machines. Because seamstresses were paid by the number of garments they sewed each day, the lost hour was precious.
Company owners seemed to be on the lookout for a chance to challenge and ultimately break the garment workers’ union. In 1909 they found one. A man who worked as a tailor at Marx & Haas tried to use the elevator instead of walking up six flights of stairs to the workroom floor. He had trouble breathing because he suffered from tuberculosis. Although the boss had ordered the tailor to take the stairs, he refused. The boss docked him a week’s pay. To protest this unfairness, Fannie and many union workers walked out of the factory.
The next day, September 13, 1909, Marx & Haas locked out all one thousand union workers and gave their jobs to nonunion people. Fannie organized strikers to march in a picket line in front of the factory. They carried protest signs and tried to convince the replacement workers not to take their jobs.
“Not fair!” they shouted. “Scabs!”
Union members used the word scab for strikebreakers, people willing to cross the picket line and work during a strike. It was an insult, as if calling someone lousy or rotten.
After an eight-week strike, the United Garment Workers of America (largely women and children) and the Clothiers Exchange agreed on abolition of subcontractors, a fifty-two-hour workweek, time and a half for overtime, no work on five legal holidays, and no discrimination for strike activity. Rochester, New York, 1913.
Police arrest a woman for picketing during a garment workers’ strike in Chicago, similar to Fannie’s strike in St. Louis. Eventually, 41,000 garment workers join the walkout. Chicago, Illinois, 1910.
So many workers refused to cross the picket line, the plant nearly had to close. Marx & Haas went to court to stop the picketing. The judge agreed with the company owners and told strikers that they must stop protesting and return to the factory, or they would lose their jobs. Fannie and other union leaders would be arrested if they even walked down the street by the Marx & Haas building! The workers stopped picketing, but did not go back to work. The strike continued.
One month into the labor dispute, UGWA Local 67’s president died of tuberculosis, and Fannie became president. Her youngest daughter was now twelve, and Fannie agreed to work for the UGWA full-time. She traveled from city to city, telling people about the low wages and unhealthy working conditions at Marx & Haas, and asking them to support the striking garment workers.
At first, Fannie was scared when she stood on-stage to speak to a crowd, but remembering the anxious faces of the hardworking girls at their sewing machines gave her strength and courage.
“Help us fight,” she told union coal miners during a speech in Illinois in November 1909. “We women work in factories on dangerous machinery, and many of us get horribly injured or killed. Many of your brothers die in the mines. There should be a bond of sympathy between us, for we both encounter danger in our daily work.”
The miners stomped their feet and shouted their agreement. Some were so moved by Fannie’s speech, they wiped tears from their eyes.
Traveling the country for two years, Fannie saw workers everywhere had the same troubles: long hours, low pay, and dangerous conditions.
Women and girls sewing in a clothing shop, likely a smaller operation than the garment factory where Fannie worked. Speedy sewing was essential, as like Fannie, they did piecework, meaning they were paid per piece of finished clothing. St. Louis, Missouri, date unknown.
Coal miners take a break. The boy, Joseph “Jo” Puma (seated), worked as a nipper, fetching and carrying for the miners and learning the trade. Jo’s mother said he was fourteen years old. Pittston, Pennsylvania, January 1911.
In December 1909, Fannie visited Chicago, where she discovered that girls in button factories worked in unheated buildings, and often cut their fingers on jagged mussel shells. A cut might not seem serious, but continually reaching into tubs of dirty water for the shells, the girls risked fatal infection. At the time, there were more cases of pneumonia, typhus, and gangrene among button factory laborers than in any other industry.
In Detroit cigar factories, ten-year-old boys had to stand on benches in order to reach their work. With fingers stained from tobacco, they tied wet sponges over their nostrils to block out poisonous fumes.
Traveling for months, Fannie spoke at union halls across the country. She asked people to support the striking garment workers in St. Louis by buying only clothes with the “union-made” label inside them. Those tags guaranteed that the workers who made those garments were treated better. Shirts and trousers without the union label came from sweatshops like the one where Fannie had worked.
Factory owners viewed young girls and boys as well-suited to making cigars due to their small hands. Children were also more manageable, cheaper, and less likely to strike than adult workers. The youngsters first cut the cigar wrappers to their proper length with a sharp, handleless chaveta knife, then measured and formed the tobacco into bundles, which they placed in the wrappers, using a special board to finally roll and seal the cigar. Tampa, Florida, 1909.
A newspaper advertisement showing various union labels, and urging consumers to demand that products they buy carry the label, thus promoting better wages and working conditions for laborers.
In July 1910, F
annie spoke to union carpenters in Iowa. Her voice rang with feeling and her dark eyes snapped. “Injury to one is an injury to all!” she said. People jumped to their feet, clapping and whooping so hard, the ruckus nearly shook the building.
“Pass the hat!” someone hollered, and a cap went hand to hand. Coins jingled and bills rustled. The union carpenters donated one thousand dollars ($25,700 today) to help the striking garment workers in St. Louis feed their families.
Fannie spoke as many as six times a day, and people listened. So many refused to buy nonunion clothing that Marx & Haas had to close one factory. With the money Fannie raised, the St. Louis strikers held out for two years until Marx & Haas gave in to the union. Working conditions did not substantially improve, but the company agreed to re-hire union workers and raise wages.
A story in the Tacoma Times tells of Fannie’s work, dateline: “St. Louis, Missouri, October 16, 1911.”
* * *
ANGEL OF MERCY
Colliers, West Virginia, 1913–1914
News of Fannie’s leadership in the garment workers’ union reached coal miners in Colliers, West Virginia, and she was asked to visit.
Fannie found miners’ families in rickety houses with no running water. They lived on biscuits and boiled beans, maybe a little bacon. Children fell asleep to the sound of their bellies growling.
The men worked sunup to sundown like Fannie had in the garment factory, but they went underground with picks and shovels. Sometimes damp and cold, sometimes stooped over or kneeling, but always covered in coal-black grime.
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